Already in 1854, Henry David Thoreau had declared in Walden that “Most men appear never to have considered what a house is” (225). Like Thoreau, many other renowned American writers have considered what houses are and, particularly, what houses do, and they have created fictional dwellings that function not only as settings, but as actual central characters in their works. The volume is specifically concerned with the structure, the organization, and the objects inside houses, and argues that the space defined by rooms and their contents influences the consciousness, the imaginations, and the experiences of the humans who inhabit them.
This publication, edited by Rodrigo Andrés and Cristina Alsina Rísquez, is a result of the international research project “(Un)Housing: Dwellings, Materiality, and the Self in American Literature". Besides of the contributions by the researchers that form this project, the volume closes with an afterword by the americanist professor Wyn Kelley.
